Voices from the Margins: Gendered images of ‘Otherness’ in colonial Morocco

Abstract

The main goal of this essay is to stu dy a book-El Marroc sensual i fanàticof travel writings written by a Catalan woman traveller, and to put it within the context of the recent scholarship that relates, on the one hand, travel narrative with Orientalism and gender and, on the other, geography and colonialism. The con tradictory nature of the contents of the book leads us to challenge the notion of simple 'Othering' as presented in Said's works where the heterogeneity of colonial power is neglected in a totalising dichotomy between the colon ising Self and the colonising Other. T he contemporary Spanish of cial discourse was indeed pro-colonial and paternalistic and often drew on notions of shared history and geographical proximity in order to legitimise an 'altruistic' colonial presence. The author's position is very different from this of cial discourse, but is deeply ambivalent. Her ambivalence arises from her gender which allows her to live the last Spanish colonial adventure as an outsider, and also from her position ing in Spanish politics. The confrontation between different cultures and traditions is sharply delineated in her accounts on M oroccan women, the primary aim of her travel. The (cultural) impermeability of the Others, with whom she would like to identify deeply, yet with whom she cannot really communicate, forces her to construct her own vision of the identity of these O thers, projecting her own view of (W estern) feminism. The essay demonstrates the importance of focusing on narratives that come from the margins (and particularly from female authors). These provide new perspectives which can destabilise established conceptions of the colonial relationship and, at the same time they can broaden the conceptual and factual history of our disciplines.The aim of this article [l] is to analyse a book of travel writings produced by a woman, Aurora Bertrana, and to set it within the context of recent scholarship relating, on the one hand, travel narrative with Orientalism and gender and, on the other, geography and colonialism . The book, El M arroc sensual i fanàtic, was written in Catalan and published in Barcelona in 1936, only a few weeks before the onset women travellers has been carried out by Englishspeaking authors and on English-speaking women travellers. Our essay, then, tries to contribute to this eld by providing material from the margins, a book written in Catalan, a minority language, and mainly dealing with a minor (in this century) colonial power, and a small, and again marginal, colony, the Spanish Zone in Northern Morocco.

Janus in the Metropole: Moroccan Soldiers and Sexual Violence Against Women in the Spanish Civil War

“…To avoid political manipulation, 10 we need contextualised public debate about violence and its legacies, although historical research offers contradictory conclusions and limitations (e.g., regarding the exact number of Moroccan men who participated in the Civil War, their socio-demographic profile and the process of their recruitment). Moreover, there are few direct testimonies from perpetrators and victims, and most testimonies are constructed from the Metropole and by men (Garcia-Ramon et al 1998;Muñoz-Encinar 2020;Palma Borrego 2009;Romero 2008). For example, we need to study why Spaniards do not know much about the stereotypes and images of themselves in the northern African colonies and their contrast to historical evidence, including sources from oral history (Fraser 2007).…”

Engendering Spanish geography

“…In fact, some of the women travellers transform their own identities through colonial contact, seeking to supersede cultural boundaries and establish a non-hierarchical contact with women living in overseas environments. The ambivalence between the world of the coloniser and the colonised is more frequently observed in writings by women travellers than in the writings of men who were serving colonial administrators (Garcia-Ramon et al, 1998 ;Albet et al, 1998Albet et al, , 1999Garcia-Ramon, 2003.…”

Gender and the Colonial Encounter in the Arab World: Examining Women's Experiences and Narratives

“…But it was not until almost the 1990s that geography's colonial encounter was reevaluated critically in a systematic way (see, among others, Bruneau and Dory, 1994;Driver, 1992;Duncan and Gregory, 1999;Godlewska and Smith, 1994;Soubeyran, 1989). Indeed, the study of travel narratives from a feminist and postcolonial perspective has played a very important role in this critical reevaluation (Blunt, 1999;Blunt and Rose, 1994;Domosh, 1991;McEwan, 1996;Secor, 1999; and see Morin and Berg, 1999 for a full survey), although outside Anglo-Americana geography very little work along this line has been carried out (see Garcia-Ramon et al, 1998;Nogue¨et al, 1996).…”